Category: Safety

Councillor Mary Fragedakis is hosting a bike rodeo on Saturday at Logan Green Field. There will be activities and safety information for kids, free mini tune-ups and advice from a local bike shop, and information about year-round cycling. Ward 29 Bikes will be in attendance, so please join us.

When Pottery Road re-opened at the end of November, some drivers reported confusion about what the newly painted sharrows meant, with some thinking that the downhill lane was for bikes only. To help alleviate any confusion on Pottery Road, the City of Toronto has erected new signs to indicate that the lane is shared by cars and bikes, that bikes should ride down in the middle of the lane, and that drivers shouldn’t try to pass cyclists while going down the hill.

Because this kind of pavement marking is still relatively new, a lot of drivers and cyclists alike may not know exactly what to do when they encounter sharrows on the road. The City of Toronto has put together a FAQ explaining the ins and outs of sharrows. The City has also produced a video to introduce sharrows to all road users:

The Bloor Viaduct is getting some fresh paint this week. On Tuesday night, city work crews laid out the first hint of what’s to come, painting thin guide marks for the full lane markings to follow. As Dan Egan detailed at our public meeting on Wednesday, the project will considerably widen the existing bike lanes along the entire length of the Viaduct and add new treatments to address the conflict zones at the DVP on-ramps identified in our 2008 Bloor Viaduct Safety Report. The new lanes are not only wider, but will also feature a small buffer zone to put even more space between cars and bikes.

We’ll have more information about the new configuration on the Viaduct once the painting is complete, but we thought you’d like a sneak peek into the work in progress on Thursday night. The whole repainting project is scheduled to be completed by next week.

The work crew sets up on Danforth for an evening of re-striping the lanes.

The new bike lanes will be much wider than the old ones, with the extra space gained by shaving a little off each of the mixed-use lanes.

When you ride the new luxury bike lanes on the Viaduct, you can thank Chris and Rob for doing the work. Thanks, Chris and Rob! And thanks too to everyone else at the City who are helping to make crossing the Don Valley safer for all cyclists.

Luke Siragusa and the rest of the Ward 29 Bikes team recently produced a professional-quality report (PDF) highlighting the safety issues faced by cyclists on the Bloor Viaduct. Conflict zones with cars exist at both ends of the Viaduct in both directions of travel, making this extremely popular cycling route less safe than it should be.

Luke’s report details the shortcomings of the Viaduct’s cycling infrastructure and offers simple, inexpensive solutions that can be applied in other conflict zones across the city.

It’s a shame that Toronto has let such dangerous conditions persist for so long when many of the fixes that Luke proposes come from the city’s very own bike lane guidelines and standards. Nevertheless, we have real opportunities here to raise awareness among cyclists, show City Hall what’s possible when citizens are engaged, and to improve a conflict zone between cyclists and motorists. Even pedestrians would benefit from improvements at both the east and west ends of the Viaduct.

Luke will deliver a brief presentation about his report to the Toronto Cycling Advisory Committee meeting shortly after 7:00 p.m. on Monday January 19, 2009 in Committee Room 2 in City Hall. We hope to see the report’s recommendations adopted this year.